We had decided to do our own thing on our first day in Venice. I’d read up on the vaporettos, and we’d decided to buy 36 hour passes (€23 each). However, this turned out to be harder than expected, at least at first. The plan was to pick up a vaporetto at Piazzale Roma to Murano.

We successfully got from the ship to the shuttle bus drop-off point, and found our way from there to the People Mover station. Then we hit the first snag – this was very busy with all those disembarking passengers from the other cruise ships, and they all had luggage, of course. When we got to Piazzale Roma it was absolutely heaving with people, and it took us a long time to buy our tickets. Then we had to choose our vaporetto route. Then we just missed one, and had to wait for half an hour for the next one. In the end, despite leaving the ship at about 9:30 it was almost midday before we were stepping ashore at Murano Museo. Then we couldn’t find the Glass Museum…. so by this time we were feeling that we hadn’t made the right choice. But we did find the museum and spent a good hour in it. This was followed by lunch in a canal-side restaurant, after which we got a vaporetto into St Mark’s Square. From there we wandered around for well over an hour, amazed at the sights we were seeing. We slowly made our way up to the Rialto which we crossed, wandered some more before deciding that we’d have a pizza – by this time it was six o’clock – with a view to returning to the ship, changing, and perhaps going back out. So we had a rather crowded vaporetto ride up the Grand Canal to Piazzale Rome, and got back to the ship by about half-past seven. There we decided that we were in fact too tired to go back out so we showered and rested up for the evening, in preparation for the early start for Sunday’s “Hiden Venice” walking tour.